Site of Cloncurry Church, Cloncurry, Co. Kildare

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Churches & Chapels

Site of Cloncurry Church, Cloncurry, Co. Kildare

At the foot of a west-facing pasture slope in County Kildare, a church has all but disappeared back into the ground. What remains is not a ruin in any dramatic sense, more a set of long, grassed-over mounds and shallow depressions that only reveal their true shape when you know what you are looking for. The building was cruciform, meaning it was laid out in the form of a cross, with a rectangular nave or chancel running roughly east to west and two transepts extending north and south from the eastern end. Traced from the surface, the main rectangular body measured around 32 metres long and 13 metres wide, with each transept adding a further 9 metres by 6 metres. That is a substantial church, and the fact that it has subsided so completely into the landscape makes it quietly strange.

The transepts have fared worst, surviving only as hollows perhaps half a metre deep, possibly stone-faced beneath the turf. The rest of the building can be read in the collapsed walling, which still stands around one and a half metres high on the interior side though it has slumped to only about 0.6 metres externally. One corner offers something more tangible: at the south-west angle, a section of the original outer wall face survives, built from thin, coursed limestone blocks and flags. It is a small but telling detail, suggesting a structure that was once carefully finished. Immediately to the south-west of the church lies what may be a children's burial ground, known in Irish tradition as a cillin, an unconsecrated plot used for the interment of unbaptised infants, positioned close to but deliberately outside the sanctified ground of the church itself.

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